When did referral rates and prescribing costs become the measure of quality of general practice?
It would be much more meaningful if local figures (and national ones for that matter) bothered to provide 95% confidence limits for the rates for referral and prescribing expensive drugs. No NHS/PCT admindroid seems capable of using EXCEL spreadsheet statistical tools for this purpose in any data sent in all the years I have practiced. Would confidence intervals show that the 'outliers' were fewer than the politicians want to believe?
What a slippery slope we are stepping on if the Telegraph article here is wholly true. You can imagine that after the first cull of 5-10% poorly performing GPs, our Masters will announce a further round of culling of the poorly performing GPs in the remaining group and so on until we are left with no-one capable of prescribing anything other than things like aspirin or paracetamol which can be handled by Noctors and Phoctors.
The Noctors and Phoctors will be cheaper for whatever guise primary care evolves into because they will do what they are told, have little if any imagination concerning differential diagnosis, and have so little training in pharmacology that prescribing costs will be well contained. However, the British public will no longer receive the high quality primary health care that we have been proud of for many decades.
So, after considering these matters, would anyone wish to follow our leaders to a new NHS?
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